Don't feed the trolls

My first encounter of internet troll was around twenty years ago, when I started frequenting gaming fora. It's also from these fora that I learned how to handle these trolls: don't feed them.

There will always be weird people who derives pleasure from causing discomfort or negative emotional response from others. Damn sadist.

Trolls are attention seekers, craving responses, any reply to them is like fuel that keeps them going.

The best way to handle these trolls is to ignore them. Don't reply, just disregard anything they said or posted. Hence the phrase: "don't feed the trolls", i.e. responding to them is feeding them more fuel, so don't.

Initially I thought that the spammer in my instant messaging group is just that, a spammer who doesn't care whether others are interested or not, whether the subject is appropriate or not, and force whatever he fancies down the others' throat in the false pretense that it's "sharing".

Oh, and that he cannot handle paragraph, so he can only post in short, fragmented sentences. Several messages that could be done in one.

It's only when another friend suggested that he should create another group with the number two spammer (he actually posted a spammer championship with all the data of how much he spammed...) so they can spam all they like without affecting the rest of us, where he responded that it's not fun if his spam doesn't make others angry that I realised he is actually a troll.

Wow, I actually know someone in person who's an internet/chat group troll. Achievement unlocked! =P

I have pretty much just directly deleted all the spam they generated anyway, now I have to remind myself not to give any response, and hopefully the others will do the same.

But there always seems to be someone who will feed the trolls though, bollocks.

Other |runaway rants| category entries.